Weight

NormalWidths

EDIT MODE

Marie Otsuka
• editorial •
December 30, 2019

Welcome! We invite you to occupy our website.

Welcome to occupantfonts.com.

It is our collective publishing platform: we write, typeset, and publish articles. It is also our portfolio: we showcase fonts and their possible uses. Together, Occupant Fonts—both our typefaces and ourselves—co-occupy this website.

You can occupy it, too! Almost everything is editable: activating Edit Mode with the top-right switch
makes you a tenant of any page. You can reset the type, modify the contents, and try any of our fonts in different contexts and combinations—in a word, sentence, or even in this paragraph. We hope this helps not only for testing out various uses but also for playing with unexpected pairings.

The site works as a tool for us, too. In addition to being type designers, we are educators; we designed this platform to support our teaching. As both type designers and teachers, one of our goals is to cultivate conversations around typography and type design. We’re excited to publish more articles exploring type, and we hope to host writings by others in this space as well. (Drop us a line if you are interested!)

We also all practice graphic design. We figured it would be fun for us to typeset every page. It turns out using our fonts everywhere proved to be a bit of a technical and typographic challenge, but typesetting real content allowed us to experience our fonts from the perspective of the designers who might use them.

We wanted our website to highlight, rather than homogenize, our distinct backgrounds. We each have roots across the globe, and we’re currently based in multiple locations. We pursue an array of side-practices, whether in drawing, printmaking, designing, or coding. These all inform the way we design type. Letting our various fonts communicate our various thoughts seemed like the most direct way to represent Occupant Fonts.

Fonts in a vacuum are inert, just taking up kilobytes of disk space until they are selected, rendered into shapes, sequenced into language, and displayed in a design before an audience. This transition from byte to letter is obvious but important. At its core, this website emphasizes this transfomation: we want our fonts to empower voices and inhabit meaningful spaces.

Type testers and blogs are nothing new. But by combining them and foregrounding the use of our typefaces, this site embodies the idea that our work—the design of letterforms—expresses points of view. And we encourage you to do the same.